Ethereum Classic - What to do now [2 min read]

Continuing from yesterday's article on Ethereum Classic, we explore what conditions would be required for this underdog to survive.

The Dead Cat Continues its Bounce

Classic at the time of this writing has gone up all the way to $2.25. That's roughly 20% of the cost of Ethereum proper, a boost of around 200% in the last 24 hours. Given that bitcoin, ethereum and steem are all down, we can surmise that a lot of money is flowing to this new coin.

So what gives? What makes people love ethereum classic so much?

Bitcoin People Are Moving In

There's considerable chatter on the bitcoin slack as well as the forums about people supporting Ethereum Classic. The impression one gets from reading is that of causing disruption in Ethereum to get money flowing back to Bitcoin. The cartoon above illustrates this well. There are a lot of people that see Ethereum Classic as a way to hurt Ethereum proper. It's hard to know how much they'll succeed, but the theory here is that buying Ethereum Classic will cause more miners to move there, causing a longer chain eventually. This in turn will cause more people to buy Classic and so on.

Be Careful

The Ethereum Core Devs recently released a new client that allows you to choose which chain to use. This means you can, with a single client, send and receive ETH and ETC. Be very careful, though. If you send some amount in ETH, the same transaction will likely work in ETC. This is called a "Replay Attack" and you should be very careful with it. All outputs before the hard fork (190,000) are vulnerable to this attack.

How to Mitigate the Replay

There are several options to mitigate the replay attack.

1. Find an exchange that will take both ETH and ETC

The idea is to send ETH and ETC to the exchange and then have them send it right back. This will cause the outputs to be past block 190,000 and will sufficiently mix the tx's such that they won't have the same hashes.

2. Coinjoin with a tx out after 190,000

This is probably the easier method. Get some ETH or ETC (buy it on an exchange or trade or whatever) and get it transferred to your wallet. Now spend all your ETH or ETC and put it into another address in your wallet. Doing it for one side of the fork is enough to ensure that you can't be replay-attacked.

The Market Can Stay Irrational Longer Than You Can Stay Solvent

It looks like Ethereum Classic is going to be around a while. Might as well make some money off of it.